Coppola's literary magazine highlights new Latin American talent

The cover of Zoetrope: All-Story's Latin American issue, by Guillermo Del Toro.

Thursday, March 26, 2009, 2:20 PM

Ten up-and-coming authors from Latin America are being published in English — many for the first time — thanks to a famous filmmaker.

The under-40 talents featured in the latest issue of the prominent literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997, showcase some of the creative literary forces from south of the border.

"These voices are breaking the mold in terms of what literary audiences think of when they think of Latin America," says Peruvian-born award-winning writer and journalist Daniel Alarcón, guest editor of Zoetrope’s Latin American issue.

The idea was born when Coppola, inspired by last year’s shooting of his upcoming film "Tetro" in Buenos Aires, immersed himself in Latin America literature and decided to dedicate a whole issue to contemporary authors.

"I wasn’t familiar with current Latin American literature," said Michael Ray, the San Francisco-based editor of the award-winning quarterly showcasing short fiction.

"I was probably just as much a part of the market for the issue as anyone — an American who’s pretty well-read but not reading current Latin American literature," he added.

Ray reached out to Alarcón, whose work he has published in past issues.

Alarcón immediately sought help from Peruvian author Diego Trelles Paz, author of "El futuro no es nuestro" (The Future Is Not Ours), an anthology showcasing some 60 young authors from Latin America, which included Alarcón.

"I figured it would be best to work with someone who had more expertise than I did," Alarcón said on the phone from Lima.

"Diego definitely suggested names that I had never heard of or read," he said of his co-guest editor. "But there were some people that I knew I wanted to include from the beginning, because they’re writers that I’ve been a big fan of for a while," he added, including Chilean Alejandro Zambra, whose first English-language translated novella, "Bonsai," was published just last year.

Alarcón says there were no real guidelines to the selection process: "I’m not a literary critic. ... In the end, taste is taste, and we picked the stories we liked the best."

The narratives are incredibly diverse in scope. Cuban Ronaldo Menéndez’s surprisingly funny "Insular Menu" features resourceful Cuban residents in the face of food rationing across the island, including a zoo director who serves ostrich to his hungry family.

Argentinian Patricio Pron’s moving "The Harvest" portrays a porn star who learns to live with AIDS. The disturbing — and sinfully satisfying — Brazilian Veronica Stigger’s "The Dwarves," follows a self-absorbed couple of dwarves who take advantage of the compassion of others until things get ugly.

All the stories are translated into English but the magazine also included them in their original language — Spanish and Portuguese.

There is also a series of raw and strong illustrations, including the cover by Mexican Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Guillermo del Toro ("Pan’s Labyrinth").

"Every issue is guest-designed by artists," Ray said. "We try to find artists who might not be known as visual artists ... and introduce readers to artists in a way they’ve never seen them before."

About the compilation process, Alarcón said, "You notice the effect [Roberto] Bolaño had on writers my age." Still, he has some reservations about the current popularity in the U.S. of the late Chilean author.

"I don’t want the Bolaño esthetic to simply replace the magical realist esthetic as the single voice of an entire continent," he says. "That would be unfortunate, by far."

He hopes the Latin American issue will be a much-needed introduction for the American reader to what’s happening south of the border.

"The lens through which [the U.S.] views Latin America, especially its literature, has been lagging behind reality for a while."